Jobs made it clear to Cook that this was not to be tolerated at Apple. “He told me never to ask what he would do,” says Cook. “Just ask what’s right, and then do it.”

There are only two secrets to making terrific homemade cinnamon rolls. The first is to embrace the fact that they are a nutritional catastrophe. Don’t try to redeem them with raisins or nuts, which distract from the three primary cinnamon-roll textures: tender, feathery bread; sticky cinnamon filling; and smooth, smooth icing.

The second secret is potato. Yes, that sounds absurd and perhaps even gimmicky. But adding a little mashed potato to cinnamon-roll dough results in incomparably moist, soft rolls.

Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts for a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.

Wait, what? Yes, you read me right. You’ve probably even seen them yourself. In airplane bathrooms, there is an ashtray (complete with No Smoking sticker) for the people who smoke in the bathroom, even though they shouldn’t.

What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended in mid-air? ZeroN is a physical and digital interaction element that floats and moves in space by computer-controlled magnetic levitation.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

"As sleep researchers, we do believe that there's an intimate relationship between insufficient sleep and the drive to store fat," Dr. Helene Emsellem of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Md., told us.

The connection between poor sleep and higher body weights has been documented in shift workers such as nurses, in mothers of infants, and even in toddlers and teens. In some cases, people do eat more when their schedules are wacky. But Emsellem says it's also possible that something more primitive is at play here.

At first things are easy. For simple screens, using a webview might be faster than writing a native implementation. As you add functionality to the webview, the complexity increases until you give up and write everything native.

In contrast, when a new iPhone model is released Apple doesn't shut down the line and liquidate inventory. Rather, Apple keeps some percentage of manufacturing capacity devoted to this legacy model. Manufacturing the old device is easy by this point; it's a fully debugged process with increasingly cheaper components. I remember when the implications of this completely sunk in: Apple is doing market segmentation off of a single product line!

Unconsidered design (or lack of design) tends to simply gravitate towards the familiar, which is a natural instinct when we’re lost in some way. The desktop windowing metaphor is familiar from older computing devices… and that’s all. Its suitability to the iPad’s form factor, usage scenarios, and current app interaction models was not considered. It introduces additional frames of interaction and cognitive load, and disregards the interaction heritage and environment of the platform.

In the 2009 film "Up in the Air," the loyal American business traveler played by George Clooney was showered with attention after attaining 10 million frequent flier miles.

Rothstein and Vroom were not impressed.

"I can't even remember when I cracked 10 million," said Vroom, 67, a big, amiable Texan, who at last count had logged nearly four times as many. Rothstein, 61, has notched more than 30 million miles.

First of all, if you’re in the market for a bathroom fan — granted, not a frequently purchased item for most — you should definitely consider the Panasonic WhisperCeiling. It’s much quieter than any other household bathroom fan I’ve ever heard. I got an 80 CFM for a half-bath and 110 CFM for a full-bath, although I think the 80 would have been sufficient for both and it’s significantly quieter than the 110.

We can’t front-load complexity and let people sort it out. That way lies madness. We must distill the rules down so that people can be effective, and help them along their journey towards JavaScript mastery. It’s a learning curve, not a learning cliff.

I’ve compiled a list of my essential iPad applications for productivity

If you could only do one thing to prepare your desktop site for mobile and had to choose between employing media queries to make it look good on a mobile device or optimizing the site for performance, you would be better served by making the desktop site blazingly fast.

With the report into the tragedy of Air France 447 due next month, Airbus’s 'brilliant’ aircraft design may have contributed to one of the world’s worst aviation disasters and the deaths of all 228 onboard.

After a good amount of digging and some pointed swear words aimed in the Wayback Machine’s direction, I’ve compiled a complete history of the last two years of Android updates.

Thinking about your future development, what are areas you want to focus on to become a better UX Designer, and what are areas you don't want to put emphasis on?

Two years before the T-Mobile G1 introduced the world to Android, Google presented carriers with the "Google Phone — a device that looked a lot more like the portrait QWERTY Android prototype shown in early 2008.

You have 38% battery left on your iPhone, and luckily you use Verizon, so you actually have a signal and can use the Maps app.

How will you make sure your battery lasts long enough that you don't get lost and die of exposure or dehydration before you make it to the nearest town?

Already, about 8% of information workers are using Mac computers, and as more workers begin using iPads and iPhones on corporate networks, Microsoft’s share of the overall operating system for business devices — including PCs, smartphones and tablets — is expected to fall below 50% in 2016.

It looks like the mobile story for 2012 is not going to be so good for Android. It appears as though the operating system is in choppy waters, and is suddenly facing a lot of trouble.

We're going to lay out all the small and big problems we're seeing for Android in this post.

One of the common challenges when designing responsive design for mobile is the navigation menu. If the site has many sections or pages, it gets challenging to squeeze all the items into a small mobile resolution. The navigation most likely ends up running into multiple lines or the buttons stacking on top each other. So I'm going to review some of the design solution and provide a quick tutorial on how to create a mobile navigation with jQuery.

In retrospect, it was more than a tad fortuitous that I had contacted Gateway. I might have still made my flight but it would have been a challenge. Instead, it was more an exercise of just-in-time management without any stress whatsoever. And isn’t that the ultimate in luxury travel?

Perhaps you're comfortable with a single company exercising this much power in an industry. After all, if the Justice Department has demonstrated anything through this suit, it's the lawyers there care about what consumers pay. If Amazon eventually used its heft to raise prices, chances are a government attorney would come knocking. But competition isn't only about price. It's about pushing companies to improve their services, or the technology they offer. When it comes to books, it's about ensuring access to ideas. It's certainly about more than just dollars and cents. 

PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.)

The notion that you should create a separate, stripped-down version for 'the mobile use case' might be appropriate if such a clean mobile use case existed, but it doesn't.

Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what's needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.

Facebook typically rolls out a minor update on every single business day. Major updates are issued once a week, generally on Tuesday afternoons. The release team is responsible for managing the deployment of those updates and ensuring that they are carried out successfully.

Frequent releases are an important part of Facebook's development philosophy. During the company's earliest days, the developers used rapid iteration and incremental engineering to continuously improve the website. That technical agility played a critical role in Facebook's evolution, allowing it to advance quickly.

Most companies (including web startups), he said, are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “‘of course’ reaction from their users.”

Puzzled, I looked at him. And then it hit me: Great design means that one look and the end user reacts by knowing what to do with a knob or a button, without as much as even thinking about it. Of course this knob is what turns the volume up, or brings up the home screen.

This of course factor is at the heart of every great design — from the iPhone to the Braun alarm radio. And it’s an important lesson that every startup and entrepreneur should remember. Whether your company is making a physical product or a web service or mobile application, it’s essential for you to think about design.

The longer term test of mobile platform performance will be in the recurring purchase rates. Loyalty must be earned and preserved. I.e. “You come for the product, you stay for the ecosystem.”

So far, the iPhone seems to be getting a passing grade while Android has yet to face the test.

My advice for anyone needing to book with Delta AMEX Companion Certificates is to find valid LUT fares for all legs online, then call online support in Dallas at 888-750-3284 and ask for a supervisor (Paula Fox in this instance).

Tasks and Features get you something functional, reliable, usable, and maybe even convenient. Organizations have trouble crossing the chasm into pleasurable and meaningful: the things that make a product exciting. When technology delivers basic needs (functional, reliable, etc.) it’s the experience that dominates1. This is illustrated in Stephen Anderson’s User Experience Hierarchy of Needs:

Rovio has announced that Angry Birds Space was downloaded 10 million times in less than three days. In fact, the game has been downloaded half a billion times since it was released three years ago. It’s amazing that the Angry Birds phenomenon is still so powerful, but not surprising when viewed through the lens of behavioral psychology.

At this point, we don’t trust America’s TSA, Britain’s Department for Transport, or airport security in general. We don’t believe they’re acting in the best interests of passengers. We suspect their actions are the result of politicians and government appointees making decisions based on their concerns about the security of their own careers if they don’t act tough on terror, and capitulating to public demands that “something must be done”.

The patent discusses the technology to analyze the background noise during your phone call and serve up ads for you based on the environmental conditions Google picks up on. Yeah, that’s creepy.

While Google isn’t technically “listening” to your calls, meaning there isn’t someone on the other line listening to your conversation, the fact that the company could unleash technology that monitors our calls in real-time is weird. Here’s some of the information on the patent, titled “Advertising based on environmental conditions”

So the bottom line is, as a consumer, how much is one willing to tolerate this? If someone like me who is an astute observer of the industry has to do such intense research on which Android device to buy based on the potential for ongoing support and then ends up getting burned in the process, what is the average consumer to do?

So I’ve decided that unless major improvements occur in the management of the Android ecosystem by Google in the next year, and if conditions for supporting handsets by the Tier 1 and main US wireless carriers do not improve dramatically, the Galaxy Nexus and the Droid Bionic are going to be my last Android smartphones.

And I’ve also decided that until the support situation substantially improves, I am no longer going to recommend Android-based products to my friends, family and colleagues. I’ll point them towards Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone instead. At least with these platforms, you’re guaranteed core OS updates and bugfixes for the length of your contract.

The sinking of the Titanic is one of the 20th century's great dramas, a mystery that has confounded scientists and historians for decades.

There is still an aura of mysticism that remains around that fateful ship and new photos that will be published in the April 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine provides for the first time a sense of what the wreck looks like today.

These new photographs, shot using state-of-the-art technology by independent research group Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, provide a greater understanding of what happened on that fateful April 15, 1912.

Given that Android's market share has continued to explode over the last 12 months, you can't blame consumer disinterest for developer apathy in the platform; the culprit is--you guessed it--fragmentation.

"In Q1 2011 Android was nearly neck-and-neck with iOS in terms of developer interest," the Appcelerator/IDC report states. "Among developers, Android (in both tablet form and smartphone) held almost as much interest as iPads and iPhones. In the past year, developer interest in both Android platforms has begun to wane... We believe this is mostly due to the fragmentation Android continues to experience and that Google seems unable to curtail, and the continued success of Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and iPad. This fragmentation, coupled with iPads continuing to outsell all Android tablets combined, has swayed developers increasingly towards iOS and away from Android."

From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this.  While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.

The Master of Suspense describes his idea of happiness.

The gist of the carriers’ lament is this: We do the hard work and someone else is making all the money. And by someone else they mean a certain interloping personal computer company that has, without the slightest experience in the technical (and deal-making) intricacies of the mobile phone industry, inexplicably lucked into the smartphone business and pocketed an unfair share of the cash.

Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors.

And the interesting thing is that the negative things people say about Bootstrap today sound exactly like the negative things people said about the Mac in 1984. And in both cases, the things that people didn't like were what made them important. permalink

Shadow lets you see one app running across an almost unlimited number of devices. You pick the devices and sync them via WiFi with your desktop computer, and when you open a web page and turn on Shadow, those devices will “follow” your clicks through each page, allowing you to see what’s broken, what works, and how the whole shebang looks on a range of smaller screens.